not too much of it. “It is the place where the animals die,” then added quickly, “the place where we’ll find the man we’re looking for.”
Mahtra looked up at the roofs. As always, the sounds fear, torment, and dying were in the air. She cocked her head one way and another, fixing the primary source of the sound. When she had it, she nodded her masked face once and said: “I understand. The killing ground. We will find him on the killing ground.”
* * *
The abattoir was the heart of Codesh. It was an old building, similar in style to the little building they hoped to find inside it, and etched with the same angular, indecipherable script Pavek had noticed at the elven market. Shadowed patches on its time and grime-darkened walls led the eye to believe that there had once been murals, but whatever grandeur the abattoir might have possessed in the past, it was a dismal place now.
Another templar watchtower rose beside a gaping archway carved through thick limestone walls. There were as many yellow-robed men and women watching over the abattoir as Nunk kept with him at the outer gate. A rack of hook-bill spears stood on one side of the watchroom door while a stack of shields made from erdlu scales lashed to flexible rattan sat on the other. Inside the watchroom, each templar wore a sword and boiled leather armor; that was very unusual for civil bureau templars and a measure of Codesh’s reputation as a thorn in Urik’s foot. They greeted Giola as if hers were the first friendly—as in not belonging to the enemy—face they’d seen in a stormy quinth.
“Instigator Nunk says I’m to take these rubes onto the floor,” Giola informed Nunk’s counterpart, a dwarf with a bit less decoration woven through his sleeve.
The dwarf swiped the oily sweat from his bald scalp before sauntering over to greet Pavek and his companions.
“Who in blazes are you that I should let you and yours stir up trouble I don’t need?”
He grabbed the front of Pavek’s shirt, a gesture well within his templar’s right to harass any ordinary citizen, but he caught Pavek’s medallion as well, and the shock knocked him back a step or two.
“Be damned,” he swore, partly fear and partly curse.
Pavek could watch the thoughts—questions, doubts and possibilities—march between the dwarf’s narrowed eyes. He judged the moment had come for revelation and pulled his medallion into view, gouge and all.
“Be damned,” the dwarf repeated.
This time the oath was definitely a curse and definitely directed on himself. Pavek felt a measure of sympathy; he had the same sort of rotten luck.
“Who I am is Pavek, Lord Pavek, and what I want on the killing ground is no concern of yours.”
Standing behind the dwarf, and half again as tall, elven Giola had a good view of the ceramic lump Pavek held in his hand. She turned pale enough to be Mahtra’s sister.
“A thousand pardons, Great One. Forgive my insolence, Great One,” she humbled herself, dropping to one knee and striking her breast with her fist. But for all Giola’s humility, there was one flash of fire when her eyes skewed in the direction of the outer gate watchtower where Nunk, who’d gotten her into this, was waiting.
“Forgive me, also, Great One,” the dwarf said quickly. “May I ask if you’re Pavek… Lord Pavek who was once exiled from Urik?”
Pavek truly got no exhilaration from the embarrassment of others. “I’m the Pavek who lit out of Urik with a forty-gold piece bounty riding on my head,” he said, trying to break the grim mood.
Giola stood erect. She straightened her robe and said, “Great One, it is good to see you are alive,” which surprised Pavek as much as the sight of his medallion had surprised her. “There’s never been a regulator dead or alive who was worth forty pieces of gold. I don’t know what you did, but your name was whispered in all the shadows. You were not without friends. Luck sat on your shoulder.”
She took a long-limbed stride around the dwarf and extended her open hand, which held the four ceramic bits Pavek had given her earlier. Everyone said Athas had changed in the few years since the Tynans slew the Dragon. Nunk said the bureaus had changed since Pavek left, and partly because of him. There could be no greater symbol of those changes than a regulator offering to return money. Or telling him, in the plain presence of other templars,